Astrobiology News

Dec 17, 2020 by News Staff

In a study published this month in the journal Icarus, planetary researchers from the United States and Germany modeled chemical processes in the subsurface ocean of Enceladus, the sixth-largest of Saturn’s moons. Enceladus’ tiger stripes are known to be spewing ice from the moon’s icy interior into space, creating a cloud of fine ice particles over the moon’s south pole and creating Saturn’s mysterious E-ring. Evidence for this has come...

Oct 23, 2020 by News Staff

Using data gathered by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and ESA’s Gaia satellite, a team of U.S. astronomers has identified 1,004...

Oct 5, 2020 by News Staff

A team of geobiologists and astronomers from the United States and Germany has identified 24 extrasolar planets that may have conditions more suitable...

Sep 14, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have detected phosphine (PH3) gas...

Aug 31, 2020 by News Staff

A team of astrobiologists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the Carnegie Institution for Science has found a wide diversity of amino acids...

Jul 31, 2020 by News Staff

Other stars could have as many as seven Earth-like planets in the absence of farther out giant planets, according to a new study led by the University...

Jul 23, 2020 by News Staff

In a new study published in the journal Microorganisms, a team of researchers from the UK, the Netherlands and Germany tested how mammalian immune cells...

Jun 15, 2020 by News Staff

Using the assumption that intelligent life develops on exoplanets in a similar way as it does on Earth, a duo of researchers from the School of Physics...

May 21, 2020 by News Staff

Living organisms comprise a system of molecules organized with specific handedness. Handedness — or chirality — is the geometric property of...

May 19, 2020 by News Staff

In a new study published this week in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. David Kipping of Columbia University and Flatiron Institute...

May 5, 2020 by News Staff

A team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has demonstrated that single-celled microorganisms such as Escherichia coli and...

May 4, 2020 by News Staff

Giant elliptical galaxies are not as likely as previously thought to be cradles of complex life, according to a paper published in the Monthly Notices...

May 1, 2020 by News Staff

A team of astrobiologists from the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University has developed a spectral field guide for Earth-like exoplanets transiting...

Mar 6, 2020 by News Staff

In a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, University of Tokyo’s Professor Tomonori Totani looked at how the building blocks of life could...

Mar 5, 2020 by News Staff

NASA’s Curiosity rover recently discovered various classes of organic matter in the Martian sediments. One intriguing group of detected organic compounds...

Jan 21, 2020 by The Conversation

Life is pretty easy to recognize. It moves, it grows, it eats, it excretes, it reproduces. Simple. In biology, researchers often use the acronym ‘MRS-GREN’...

Jan 7, 2020 by News Staff

Since exoplanets are so far away, astronomers cannot look for signs of extraterrestrial life by visiting these distant worlds. Instead, they must use a...

Dec 30, 2019 by The Conversation

The existence of habitable alien worlds has been a mainstay of popular culture for more than a century. In the 19th century, astronomers believed that...

Dec 26, 2019 by News Staff

A team of researchers at MIT has found that phosphine, which is among the stinkiest, most toxic gases on Earth, cannot be produced in any other way except...

Dec 5, 2019 by Enrico de Lazaro

A species of archaea called Metallosphaera sedula is capable of growth on stony meteorites, utilizing metals trapped within these extraterrestrial objects...